Paul Winterbottom, owner of The Alternative Board (Manchester West), talks about his award-winning work helping local business owners achieve their goals.
Paul is celebrating the 10th anniversary of leaving his job in banking after 30 years to set up on his own running The Alternative Board (TAB) franchise for Manchester West. As a long-standing Chamber member and Trafford Vice-President, Paul is a well-established figure in the local business community who shares his decades of experience with other businesses.
The purpose of TAB is to help business owners and their leadership teams improve their businesses and change lives, Paul explains. “For many business owners running a business of whatever size can be quite a lonely existence,” he says. “Very few people are able to have a truly honest conversation about how their business is going.”
Membership of a TAB board gives someone access to a monthly board meeting of up to half a dozen non-competing business owners who meet as a discreet and confidential group. Paul’s role is to chair and facilitate the meeting. Each time the group meets, every member brings a topic that they want help or guidance with. The meetings cover all manner of issues from improving the business to expansion.
Paul says: “The rest of the board is there to help that person with their topic and, because they're not competitors in any way shape or form, what that individual gets is advice, guidance, suggestions and recommendations. They get different perspectives from fellow business owners who have been in a similar situation to the one that they're describing. The board is there to help them make a better-quality decision than they would have done if they'd been left to their own devices.”
As well as the board meeting the TAB member gets a monthly one-to-one with Paul, either face-to face or virtually, to help them keep on track with their objectives. At the one-to-one, Paul will check on the progress the member is making on the commitments they made at the preceding board meeting.
“Sometimes I’m holding people's feet to the fire, sometimes patting them on the back for having done it, sometimes helping them with implementation,” Paul says. “Through the two interventions every month we make progress. TAB helps them make decisions about what to do and then make sure that it gets done.”
The Secret of Success
One of the secrets of TAB’s success is that the members of the board are not competitors, so members can speak freely about their business without the fear that a rival will take advantage of their difficulties or steal their ideas.
“Bringing together business owners who want to help each other but are not competitors is one of the ways of enabling the creation of a safe and confidential space,” Paul says. “A few years ago, one of my members, completely unprompted by me, said in a board meeting that it was the only place in the whole month that he could be completely honest about his business. When I tell that story, it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up for two reasons. I was (and still am) glad that he had somewhere that he could be truly honest. But it's also a bit of a sad indictment that the reality for most business owners is that they've no-one who they can be completely open with and ask for help.”
Paul points out that in other situations, such as networking events, people will invariably say their businesses is doing well even if the opposite is true because they don’t want to let their guard down when there could be competitors in the room. Even company board meetings may not give a business owner the truly honest feedback the owner is paying the board members’ salaries and while a husband or wife can provide a sympathetic ear to your problems, they may not have the relevant business experience to advise you. TAB therefore provides a unique forum where business owners can be open and honest in an environment that is supportive but also challenges them to keep on track with their goals.
Membership of TAB is usually aimed at established businesses with 10 or more employees that have moved beyond the start-up phase and are looking to expand. When people are starting a business Paul says they usually don’t have the money or the time to commit to TAB meetings as they are so busy getting their enterprise off the ground.
Expanding the TAB brand in Manchester
Current members of Paul’s TAB range from businesses with between five and 150 employees. He holds the TAB franchise for Manchester West but would love there to be other TAB franchisees locally.
“I’m really keen to get other people doing what I do in Manchester because there's massive opportunity and there's a limit to how much I can do on my own,” he says. “I’d recommend to people who might be at a crossroads in their careers and are thinking about what to do next to consider taking on a TAB franchise. It’s a perfect business for someone looking to come out of the corporate world or someone with proven experience of running their own business.”
Paul was at such a crossroads in his own career 11 years ago after 30 years in the banking industry. For the first 20 years he had worked supporting everything from SMEs to large corporate businesses. His last 10 years were spent in strategic roles connected with the branch network running teams in Manchester and Edinburgh, supporting all the NatWest branches in the north of England and all of the RBS branches in Scotland in a range of areas including, customer service, change management, operational risk, targets and incentives, resourcing and recruitment.
“I did all sorts of really interesting stuff, but it got to the point where RBS / NatWest was going through lots of restructure and there was a risk that I’d end up doing a job I didn't want to do,” he explains, “I therefore took the opportunity to leave in same week that I turned 50 as I reckoned I had a good 10 years to have a crack at something else.”
After 30 years working for the same company, Paul admits that starting his own business was both “scary and exciting”. When he bought his TAB franchise he was starting from scratch with no clients and no revenue. He had to go out and educate business owners about TAB which was an unknown proposition at that point in Manchester. Chamber membership was key for Paul in those early days as it enabled him to do huge amounts of networking where he got to know people and explained what he did.
Despite the challenges of setting up on his own, Paul chose TAB as it gave him the support of a wider network. “Being part of a franchise organisation gave me an immediate group of peers to support and encourage me,” he says. “I sit on a board once a month with my peers talking about the challenges and opportunities that I face running my business at my own peer board, which is facilitated by the UK franchisors. I get the same benefit from that once a month that I deliver to the clients that I work with.”
Today Paul has 18 members and the average time a client stay with him is seven years, which is well above the national average, and three have been with him 10 years. Paul believes the secret of retaining clients is continually delivering value via the Board meeting and the 1:1s which exceeds the client’s investment of time and money. He is particularly proud of the fact that although some of his clients had to close during Covid restrictions, none of the businesses failed. He attributes this achievement to the support the TAB members were able to give each other support with everything from furlough to bounceback loans, to pivoting businesses to survive.
Paul says: “I'm not interested in trying to convince people that joining a TAB Board is what they should do, but when I meet people who absolutely get it then it can be quite magical in terms of the results that we deliver. I’m very clear about what the commitment is that I expect of them if they're going to be a member. I'm very selective, I only add a new member to an existing board if I think they're going to make it better.”
Last year Paul won the GB Franchisee of the Year Award in recognition of his exceptional achievements in delivering peer advisory boards and business coaching via his TAB franchise. The judges commended him as a ‘true ambassador for TAB’ for his strong representation of TAB’s values. At the time of the award, Ed Reid, Managing Director of TAB UK, praised Paul’s work saying: “His Manchester members wax lyrical about the support and results he delivers to their businesses, and he is equally committed to championing TAB across the UK. Paul’s contributions to the franchise community have undoubtedly strengthened TAB as a whole.”
Paul has also been awarded TAB UK’s franchisee of the year award four times in the last ten years.
The Year Ahead
Paul’s long career helps him put the current challenges facing businesses in perspective. He says: “I think 2025 will be hard. Pretty much everybody is going to end up paying more, some significantly more, because of the National Insurance and minimum wage increases and they haven't hit yet. Businesses are planning for that now, but the real impact has been felt yet, although it’s playing into this year’s budgets. And then there are the changes to Inheritance Tax which are impacting the investment and succession planning decisions of many owners.
“Business owners are looking critically at the impact of those changes and there’s definitely a reduced level of business confidence at the moment, which is holding businesses back from taking the step to invest in growth, whether that’s in equipment, technology, premises or people.
“However if you look at every year since I've been running my TAB business and helping other business owners, there have been challenges of some description or other. What I would say is that the clearer the landscape, the better businesses can actually plan and therefore it’s uncertainty can be the real killer.”
If you’re interested in becoming a member of The Alternative Board or taking on your own TAB franchise, contact Paul at pwinterbottom@thealternativeboard.co.uk.